Data cards, such as those containing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices, may be used in various applications including networking applications.
Data cards may be provided in the form of a computer expansion card, and may include PCI-Express or PCIe compliant bus interface pluggable into the motherboard of a computer for power and data exchange. These boards may include a number of input and output connections, including host interface edge connectors and physical communication interfaces such as RJ45 Ethernet and connectors for Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) transceivers for high speed serial data links to other nodes within a network (e.g. switch, router, server, etc.).
In some applications, data cards may be housed or deployed in rackmount compatible or “rackable” servers within a data center. When data cards are housed or deployed in rackmount compatible or “rackable” servers, currently employed data cards designs may not provide easy access to all available connections on the data cards.